Medico-Legal Perspectives in Patient Safety and Safety Culture in Primary Health Care
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Nursing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 March 2023) | Viewed by 3711
Special Issue Editor
Interests: patient safety; safety management; culture of safety; clinical risk management; ethics committee; medical liability; end-of-life decision; informed consent
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to submit manuscripts for a Special Issue on Patient Safety and Safety Culture in Primary Health Care. Patient safety is a fundamental right in health care systems worldwide, as stated by the World Health Organization (WHO), who has defined patient safety as “the absence of preventable harm to a patient and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum”. Patient safety has to be maintained through three main strategies: recognizing risk, preventing harm, and reducing errors. The recent development of the application areas of clinical risk management have allowed health care professionals to implement plans to prevent mistakes. This predisposition contributed to the spread of patient safety culture in public health, with the aim of building safer health systems.
Furthermore, the recent experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced health care providers to face new scenarios in which some medical and surgical practices were modified, affecting the mode of treatment delivery.
Several medical–legal issues have arisen in the context of safety culture, especially in emergencies, posing some interesting challenges: end-of-life decisions, informed consent, confidentiality, medical liability, the management of nosocomial infections, and telemedicine.
The COVID-19 epidemic also resulted in changes in ethics committee (EC) activity in promoting the ethical values in research and in ensuring the ethical protection and standards for all of the individuals involved in COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 research. The need to accelerate research to guide public health interventions should not come at the expense of thorough ethical review, even in emergency situations.
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) aims to provide an overview of advances in managerial strategies, risk management, patient and operator safety culture in primary care and public health, and research policies that can be applied to cope with different scenarios (e.g., emergencies).
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome, as are perspectives, community case studies, and policy analyses.
Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following: regulatory aspects of clinical risk management and patient safety, medico-legal implications in professional liability, ethical and bioethical aspects of the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 research, end-of-life decisions in primary health care, and informed consent.
I look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Lucia Tattoli
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- patient safety
- safety management
- culture of safety
- clinical risk management
- ethics committee
- medical liability
- end-of-life decisions
- informed consent
